Businesses often prefer to minimize labor costs even when there's an overall increase to operating costs. Replacing humans with ChatGPT at a 20% markup over labor costs is still going to be an attractive prospect to many MBAs.

Did NASA decide not to do it, or did Trump cut funding and Elon Musk axe fire employees to the point where NASA had to triage?

We put a ton of money and engineering into reducing network latency well below 0.1 seconds. For stuff on the scale of Facebook, for instance, latency is addressed by moving data to where it's likely to be used next. (If you go on a trip to another continent, Facebook will copy your profile data to a datacenter on that continent.) In low Earth orbit, the satellite will make a complete orbit in just a couple hours, so you'd be needing to move data constantly. Or you'd eat the latency of moving data from the far side of the world.

If you want to use geostationary orbit to handle that problem, you've got as much latency as your datacenter being halfway across the world, because information moves through copper wire about two thirds as fast as the speed of light. If that were generally considered acceptable, today you'd see most companies just putting datacenters wherever it's convenient and not worrying about getting close to the end user.

Your orbital datacenters need to host applications that either require little local storage (so it doesn't matter which satellite you use) or are very insensitive to latency (so it doesn't matter that you're connecting to a satellite that's 35,000km away).

Generative AI and some types of supercomputing might fit the bill. But both are power-hungry and therefore cooling-hungry. Cooling stuff in space is hard.

Schmidt is letting his sci-fi imagination run wild and ignoring practical realities.

Deorbiting a satellite generally means it gets vaporized. How safe is the resulting material? Do we want it in our atmosphere? There aren't any international regulations establishing caps for this sort of pollution.

There are two ways to address the problem. The first and simplest is to put fewer satellites in orbit. The second is to deorbit them intact, which can take a lot of mass budget. Nobody makes money from this, though, so it's not going to happen.

Kilby Blades effectively said that hiring a ghost writer is the same as writing. All she had to say was "We request that your wordcount reflect what you wrote." It isn't surprising that a group of writers entering a writing challenge have strong opinions about people submitting stuff they actually wrote!

I've heard a rumor that she was disrespectful to the volunteers. Events like this depend so much on volunteers, you really need to take care of them.

They aren't trying to produce a modernized system that does the same tasks just as well. They want to produce a buggy, broken version that denies people the benefits they earned.

Killing off a functioning system that many people rely on is best done in inches. If they migrate people over little by little, if the payments become unreliable rather than vanishing, fewer people take to the streets in any given month. And once people are contemptuous toward social security, it's easier to remove it via legislation.

DEI is just anti-discrimination. They didn't preemptively cut out part of their potential workforce, you say, so they're about to fail. Bonkers.

Meanwhile, they're spending money on advertising platforms and AI and other things nobody asked for. Things that take away from their core business and cost a lot of money.

They're increasing AI investment to justify laying people off.

Or worse than that, they're using the phrase "increasing AI investment" to justify laying people off.

Bluesky has some decentralized aspects, but all the data has to go through a relay, and that's sufficiently expensive that only Bluesky has one running. This means that Bluesky's moderation applies to everyone.

Mastodon is heavily decentralized. My instance doesn't rely on anyone else's servers. No large corporation can moderate my messages globally. There's smaller scale moderation, which is quite necessary to deal with hate speech and organized harassment. But the only people who can moderate my speech across the whole network are the admins of my instance.

They had a lot less influence over the sitting President a year ago, for one thing, but otherwise, yeah, I agree that we should have been calling them oligarchs in the past too.

No. The right wing is very keen on censorship. They are eager to talk about free speech when it's their right to incite stochastic terrorism. When it comes to talking about gay people holding hands, they want that banned.

Yes, this is called not trusting drivers to do what they're legally obligated to do. It's a safety move.

He's talking about a number of scenarios that include but are not limited to Skynet, where humans cease to be the dominant faction on the planet in favor of AI:

He added: âoeAnd how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples. Thereâ(TM)s a mother and baby. Evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother, but thatâ(TM)s about the only example I know of.â

London-born Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, said humans would be like toddlers compared with the intelligence of highly powerful AI systems.

âoeI like to think of it as: imagine yourself and a three-year-old. Weâ(TM)ll be the three-year-olds,â he said.

China is not a monolith. It's a capitalist nation where even government power is divided, not applied with a unified objective. If the execs at Tencent decided to build the most powerful supercomputer in the world, they could. The government of Shenzen could decide to outdo them the next year, giving a massive grant to the South University of Science and Technology. Xi Jinping could stop either, but it would take political capital.

DeepSeek is a product of an AI hedge fund, High-Flyer. Presumably they're trying to monetize their machine learning systems to make up for some of its performance gaps in stock market trading. You don't monetize an LLM by saying it's expensive and has poor results.

The problem with the streaming industry is that it's an industry rather than a single provider. Netflix can lower prices, the whole industry could, but it's still less convenient than having a single source for stuff to watch.